As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
One type of information handling system is a blade server, or simply “blade.” Blades are often self-contained information handling systems designed specifically to allow the placement of multiple blades in a single enclosure or aggregation of enclosures. A blade enclosure or chassis may hold multiple blades and provide services to the various blades such as power, cooling, networking, interconnects, and management. For example, the chassis may include a plurality of power supply units configured to provide power to blades mounted in the chassis.
Under traditional approaches, failure of a power supply unit in a non-redundant configuration may result in a chassis management controller reducing the power to each of its blades by throttling to a minimum operating level in an effort to allow as many blades as possible to receive power needed to operate. However, even when all blades are throttled to a minimum level, the power capacity of remaining power supply units may not be sufficient to provide the necessary power to each of the blades. In such a scenario, the chassis management controller may completely power off low-priority blades such that higher-priority blades may continue operating. A disadvantage to this approach is that high-priority blades may be throttled, at least temporarily, even though there may be sufficient power capacity within the remaining power supply units to continue to operate the high-priority blades in an unthrottled state (e.g., due to the powering off of the low-priority blades). Such throttling may lead to decreased performance.